Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The Five Year itch strikes again..

HAs anyone noticed that five years (+ 2 or 3 months) seems to CONSISTENTLY be the lifespan of any Legion incarnation, or at least the maximum
time before major changes are put in?

Except for the early Adventure/Action run (hey, people had ATTENTION SPANS in those days before all these gol-durned video games!), we've had:

v2: *SUperboy* & LSH: 197-259 - 64 issues!
(about 5 years, or at least 5 years worth of issues, since earlier ones weren't monthly)

Superboy leaving was a major upheaval/change back then, certainly enough to change the cover title. Let's see, then the rest of v2 went from 260-325... 66 issues (5.5 years!)

Oh, but then there was the Baxter Series which lasted, uh...63 issues!!! (notice a pattern here?)

Then, though, there was v4 which went along just fine until they re-booted at about ...oh ...issue 61 (or was it 62?)!!! again just over 5 years!

But once re-booted, we went along just fine (with theoretically twice the output due to 2nd book, although if you ask me each had half the content of the older style), from about issue 62 or so until...issue 125!!! Gee, that's 64 issues!!!

Since then (DnA), we had 12 issues of Legion Lost, 6 Issues of Legion Worlds, now 38 issues of "the LEgion"...56 issues, and if you move the Blight from the previous set to here, they're both about exactly 60!

aAnd now, here we go again! It's the 5 year itch rearing its ugly head.

So, is there some unwritten rule that if a book doesn't become pure gold after 5 years, you overhaul? I mean, this is pretty consistent here....


(BTW, apologies if this has been brought up before, Im a new poster here...used to do
RACDL on usenet under chyde or CraigAndCecilia, me being the former...once started Inferno Defamation League (the pyscho fem Inferno, that is) but generally very quiet)....

Welcome to LW.net ... weren't you on the (pre-reboot {g}) DC Message Boards, as well?

Every five years, that's about right -- and I don't recall this being framed in such a way, at least around here.

It could be that this is all a creative team can stand nowadays, with all of its members working in close proximity. (Conceptually, anyway, even if not in the same city.) And, since the '70s, with the market for talent being more fluid, and freelancers being, well, freer to move between projects and publishers.

They didn't have freelancers, to speak of, in the "Adventure" era and earlier, from all I've read. Almost all were company men (almost all men) who'd go from one assignment at the publisher to another. That would stir matters up and cause creative sparks, as well as rotate those who didn't work well together after awhile. But they'd stay at the same firm for decades.

I'd make another case, starting circa 1973, for the Legion having a reboot -- in some basic aspect -- about every ten years, or every other Five Year Itch.

After being in limbo with its leaving Action Comics in 1970, the Legion appeared sporadically, not returning consistently until "Superboy" 197 in September 1973. That had Cockrum's visual rethinking (especially costumes!) and a societal look reflecting our having, by then, been to the moon in "our time" ... stepping off this planet was no longer theoretical.

The change to the direct market, with slicker paper, more focused color, and more fluid storytelling, came ten years later with Volume 3 in August 1984. This wasn't the newsprint-based directness, with garish colors, but a more subtle and intricate story path. It also moved comics away from being a mass medium, which nobody quite realized at the time.

The Levitz-era stories and their permutation (or twisting) into TMK and later tales ended up with the full restart in 1994, partly from continuity having become so important and being so utterly fouled up.

This current reboot, yet another ten years on, comes not so much from continuity matters as from creative exhaustion. DnA ran with it, but couldn't find enough new reasons -- that fit with the battered Legion concept -- to keep running.

So a minor reset every five years, a major one every ten. It's odd to discern patterns like that, but I see something recurring to them, nonetheless.

It may get an "itch" shakeup in 2009, but I don't think we'll have to worry about another reboot in 2014 ... because new paper comics are unlikely to be published then.

Unless the patterns go to something resembling manga -- as the Japanese read them at home, not as they're translated to North America in word and style -- it'll be entirely digital, on everyone's eBook reader, and may not even be genuinely "sequential art" any more. The Legion concept will still exist, but it'll take a new Shooter and a new Cockrum to translate it to a new medium.

Well I seem to remember reading that comic book readership turned over every 7 years. So that may be close enough to your five year pattern to explain why things change.

Actually, the most famous assessment of "turnover" was editor Mort Weisinger's, back in the Legion's "Adventure" era. He believed that fickle kids (pre-pubescents, to be precise) would tend to follow a title for no more than about two years. Thus, he felt, story ideas could be recycled safely after about that much time, while avoiding charges of unoriginality.

Following any title -- or concept, however much moved around -- for longer than that still is rare for kids, but most comics aren't sold to or read by kids any more. We have many Legion fans here going back 20, 30, 40 years or more, and we ain't kids! Following continuity -- if you like a title's concept -- will also keep some readers around longer.

I have to think that most readers remain fickle, though, or easily dissatisfied. I'd doubt that even the outside limits of dedication are more than about five years these days.

Thus the "Itch" described above kicks in, at least for the Legion, to try to keep fans around. A dubious undertaking, but many marketing and sales theories do stick around long past their useful lifespan.

I never realized it went that far back but I certainly noticed that the baxter and gap eras certainly did run five years. So when the reboot ran out after five years and "Legion of the Damned" just didn't sound like my cuppa I made a few complaints and said "Oh, well, hopefully I'll like what comes along in five years." and moved on.

So for those who are unhappy with things changing, hopefully I'll like this run and in five years it'll be your turn again. That's how I looked at things five years ago.

Wow, this is a really good point, and dead on I think...

...except that perhaps one could argue that starting TMK/v4 was more of a major upheaval than the start of Baxter, at least from a plot perspective.

I only bring this up because it brings hope: The v2-v3(Bates/Levitz) run is one of the more popular (and in my own opinion one of the best), and this essentially went 15 years with two "minor" upheavals (the attempt to remove Supes and the intro of Baxter style), whereas the more controversial TMK v4 run then went only 5 years.

So, if they do a really good job with the next version, perhaps we can look forward to up to 15 years without a major *continuity* change, although we should still expect some form of change (e.g. creative team, etc.) every 5...

A somewhat related thought: I wonder if the latest decision to completely re-boot isn't an attempt to properly inject the sales boost that they failed to get with the previous re-boot in '94 because they *didn't restart the numbering!* I mean they went out of their way to throw away all this history so as not to intimidate new readers, but what's a person to think when confronted with issue numbers like 63? Conversely, no need to re-start numbering with "Legion Lost/the Legion" but did so anyway...

*sigh*

P.S. I was/am on the DC boards("ConfusionIsTruth") as well, thanks for asking, GoldenGreyEagle ... and boy, this board is really a step up from the others, I must say!

I don't think any of us would accuse TPTB at DC for really thinking through most of the changes, to tell you the truth--you're right that it was silly not to renumber from the reboot. Although that was back in the days when renumbering wasn't anywhere near as common as today.

Really never thought about it..but it sure is interesting how that worked out. I gonna take a time bubble ahead five years and see what is happening to the Legion.
Or better yet see who is writting it then.

I also think the hero's story circles about every 5 to 7 years. Doesn't really the creative team after a span of stories lots of have been told.

You notice we see certain themes recycled usualy ending with the "End of Batman" atleast once a decade.

The hero's journey was meant to be finite.

Jorge